Post navigation

To create a GIF animation from multiple photos or images, using an online service is obviously the simplest way, you don’t need to download or install anything, and they work on all operating systems including Windows, Mac, Linux, and you don’t need to pay for it.

1. Make a GIF online

You can make a gif online with this handy site: http://gifcreator.me/, it supports many input image formats: jpeg, png, bmp, gif and psd.

You can also set the image size and animation speed easily with a few clicks.

The domain name is one of the most important part of a website, registering a cool domain name is not easy today, but if you pay attention to these domain names you like, you still have many chances. Continue reading →

If you need to ensure that the files on your back up device( such as an USB drive, an Amazon S3 account ) are identical to the ones on your Windows PC( such as Windows 7, Windows 10 ) or Linux Server( such as Redhat, CentOS ), then there are several ways to accomplish this task.

1. Using a Hash generator

Since each different files have their own hashes, if two files have the same hash value, then they are identical.

There are many MD5 or SHA1 hash generators on the Web, most of them are free. However not all of them are good ones. The one I have used several years is named MD5Summer, it works on Windows XP and Windows 7, supports both 32-bit and 64-bit systems.

MD5Summer enables to create MD5 and SHA1 checksums for all the files and subfolders inside the directory you specified, and save the result in a plain text file. The result contains the hash value and file name for every files.

After you’ve generated the hash values for a folder, you can use the output text file to verify another folder to see whether they are identical.

MD5Summer is easy to use and totally free. I’ve added it to the system path of my computer, then when I run “MD5″ command with the “Win” + “R” shortcut, Windows will bring up MD5Summer.

2. Use a file comparing program

This type of programs usually compare your files in two mode: text mode or binary mode, and can list the difference between two text files( such as .txt files and source code files written in PHP, Python, C++, Ruby, Swift, JAVA, Javascript languages ), and show whether two binary files are different or not.

One of them is KDiff3, the shortcoming of this type of software is that, they only compare files on the fly, and don’t save the hash values to your disk, thus you can’t use them after a few weeks to know whether the files inside a folder had changed or not.

Another shortcoming of it is that, you can’t compare files on two computers without copying them to a single computer. Using the hash generator, you can use the output file that contains hash values of files on one computer, to verify the files on another computer, you only need to copy a single file. If there are tens millions of files, the first method should be better.

3. Using a Linux bash script

If you’ve copied your files from one server to another with some command like rsync, you may need to know whether those files are copied correctly.

In such case, you can write a simple script to generate the MD5 or SHA1 hashes of the files.

Suppose that the current directory is /home/sites/public_html/myappmag/, then you can generate all of the files under this folder to a text file with this command:

find . -type f -exec sha1sum {} + | sort > sha1_output.txt

This command will find all the files under current folder, generate the sha1 checksums of them, and sort the result, then write to a text file named sha1_output.txt.

In this way, you can verify that the back up files are identical to the original ones. If you need to move your server provider to a new one, such as Linode, DO( Digital Ocean ), Liquid Web, Softlayer, Leaseweb, Hostgator, Godaddy, etc, then I think this script may help you.

There are many domain name registrars on the Web: Godaddy, Name.com, Namecheap, Network Solutions, Google, Gandi.net, 1and1, 101domain, Enom, Dynadot, Namesilo, etc. Then which is the best one?

I’ve used 6 different domain name registrars, the first domain name I registered was at 2008, 7 years ago. According to my own experience, I think Namecheap is the best one, I can list lots of reasons for this conclusion:

1. Namecheap does not steal your domain

I’ve heard several stories that there’s a few domain registrars will register the domain name you’ve searched, before you register it. Though I’ve not experienced this and can’t say whether these stories are true or false, but I can confirm that namecheap doesn’t log my search history then register these domain names before I registering them.

2. Namecheap is more secure

Namecheap enables you to turn on two step authentication with multiple cell phones. When you log in with your password, you’ll need to enter the code in the text message sent by namecheap to proceed.

Suppose that you need to add your signature to a PDF document, however, you don’t have a pdf editing software, and you won’t to print the pdf to a paper, place your signature on the paper and then scan this paper back to a digital file.

In this case, you can convert your pdf to images with an online app, download these images to your computer, sign the special page with your trackpad, or iPhone, iPad. You can also capture the signature on another paper with your camera, then merge it with the previous image.

There are many online PDF to JPG converters on the Web, however, not all of them are easy to use. Some ones of them don’t allow you to custom the DPI of your images, some of them are not free, and some of them only supports up to 5MB of files.

www.PDFtoJPG.me is the best one among them, it’s totally FREE, works on any device including mobile phones, Windows PC, Mac PC, etc. www.PDFtoJPG.me has many features that the similar services haven’t offer. Such as customizable prefix of the output file name, enables to specify the page range to convert, preview different DPI of the final images on you computer, specify DPI between 6 and 600.

www.PDFtoJPG.me is very simple and easy to use, even if you are a newbie to the Internet, you can use it without any problem.

Today I checked a scheduled bash script which is used to clear temp files regularly through the crontab, but found that these files still exist, they’re not removed, this means that the bash script hasn’t been executed correctly. Continue reading →

Suppose that you’ve taken a photo with your digital camera or mobile phone, and want to set this image as your Windows or Mac desktop wallpaper. In most cases, the proportion of your image will not match the proportion of your desktop, you can resize it with MS paint and keep the original proportion, however, it’s almost impossible to crop and resize it to match the proportion of your monitor with MS paint, it’s too simple to accomplish this task. Continue reading →

We’ve covered 15 best web proxy websites a few months ago, which enables to unblock almost any blocked websites like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc. However, web proxies have some obvious limitations, for instance, most of them do not allows to bypass geographic restrictions and watch videos and movies on popular video websites like Hulu, Netflix, or listen music online on popular music websites like Pandora and Deezer. Continue reading →

If you are a painter, sculptor, designer, musician, singer, architect, poet, or any other type of artist, or just a guy who love art, then you should not miss these art websites, which allows to inspire yourself with creative artworks, buy or sell art( paintings, music, photography, … ) online, decorate your home with unique and artistic crafts. Now let’s take a look at the 20 most popular art websites, which are collected according to their popularity. Continue reading →